Truly awful film
Anna Karenina is one of the greatest works of literature ever written, it does not need pretentious styling to make it a great movie! This feels like a director trying to show off how cleaver he is, which simply gets in the way of the story. I was quite shocked at how bad this is, considering its the same director who shot Pride and Prejudice. Even much of the acting, with the exception of Jude Law and Alicia Vikander, feels stilted like a bad school play. Many say that there are loads of other versions, but actually the only modern english language version is the Sean Bean & Sophie Marceau 1997 version, 15 years earlier and that had no where near the production budget this film did.
There is a gap in the market for straight telling of the story, that this simply doesn't fill.
The score is however magnificent.